Data, GIS and Mapping Tools

I love location data – it tells so many stories, and shows so many scenarios of our past, present and future. You must learn how to manipulate geographic information if you want to stay relevant in urban planning.

Check the Find GIS data page if you want to find and download about a place and to use in these tools.

GIS and mapping

Desktop

Quantum GIS (QGIS) – Free, open source software that works on Mac, Linux, and Windows. QGIS is especially helpful to convert geodata between formats, like KML to shapefile and vice versa. Read all posts about QGIS.

GRASS – This has very powerful conversion tools, based on OGR, and is essentially a GUI for OGR. I’ve used this to convert shapefiles to DXF files for use in AutoCAD.

MapWindow – While I continued to figure out the best, fastest and least error prone method to convert shapefiles to KML files, I came across the free and open source MapWindow software.

uDig – Another GIS application.

Web

Geocoding sources: This is the most complete list of free and paid geocoding services I’ve seen (all have developer APIs).

DropChop – in-browser GIS; this website can manipulate geodata in many ways that ArcGIS and QGIS can, but do it faster and without download software. However, it’s limited and won’t be able to process large geodatasets.

Data tools

OpenRefine – Clean up and get to know your data a little better. Also helpful at creating new data based on existing fields, or fetching data from APIs using your data as parameters. For example, using the Sunlight Labs Congress API, I fetched the U.S. congressional districts for street addresses based on their latitude/longitude coordinates.

Building classification – one of many maps from ITO that visualize data coverage in any part of the world (building classification is one type)

Import/export

HOT Export Tool – Select an area of the world to extract download; you can customize the tags that are included in the extract.

OnOSM – encourage business owners to use this so they can get their locations added to OpenStreetMap without having to edit the map themselves (it works by having them fill out a form, which adds a “note” to the map that OSM editors will see)

CAD Mapper – Export data as CAD files for architects

Overpass Turbo

BigMap 2 – export a large static map image of an area (very difficult to use but it stitches together large areas into a single high-resolution PNG image file)